It’s a thought provoking article, but on reflection, I do find myself disagreeing on a key framing:

that we are powerless. Or, more specifically, that we have been made powerless. That our power has been taken from us, and given to people who should not have power.

I don’t think we have been made powerless. What I think we have been made is to believe in the supremacy of the individual; that the self-actualization of the individual is in an inherent good above other things, even if it comes at the cost of millions we don’t know being gunned down; that the realization of an individual’s personal dreams takes priority over collective good and humanitarian cause.

And through this, we are faced with a deep sense of constructed existential dread. If we risk sacrifice for humanity, we are faced with the prospect of the loss of those individualist dreams, of never being self-actualized, of being forgotten and treated like a fool or as mentally ill.

I don’t condone adventurism, but there is another side to that coin, which is maybe what I’d called passionism (I have not thought the term through, I’m open to a better word); this is where you treat a crisis to humanity as a sort of side hobby while you try to do your individualist dreams anyway; you rationalize helplessness in this context, but it is not a totality of helplessness, rather it is a need to give up on some things you thought were essential to a meaningful life in order to fight for what is right. Some people struggle even to do this on a basic level of inconvenience via boycotting. The takeaway here isn’t to scold those people or imply they are of bad moral character. The point is more that what is deemed possible and impossible sometimes has to do with what you are willing to give up and what you are willing to risk. And I’d argue some of that seeming prison of powerlessness, particularly in the US, is an existential one brought on by individualism.

You don’t have to be reckless to sacrifice, but you may have to sacrifice some things you thought were essential. If not, with inaction, material conditions are going to catch up and force you to give up some things anyway. So it’s more a question of whether you do it on your own terms or not, than whether it will happen at all.